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Open Books: Events
May 04, 2010 07:30 PM
JOANIE MACKOWSKI
Joanie Mackowski joins us to read from her second collection -- View from a Temporary Window ($14.95 Univ. of Pittsburgh). And what a view it is -- the ordinary made extraordinary through her distinctive imagination, attention, and lyricism. As that title suggests, the poems rise from a mind attuned to the power of shifting perspective, to the unsettling, enchanting inevitability of change -- celestial and cellular. The language (and search) of natural science joins with the otherworldly situations (and revelation) of fairytale or dream or deep contemplation to create a poetry of and about transformation, and does so in an elegant quietness of tone and remarkably graceful musicality. With warmth, and the occasional -- realistic -- note of melancholy, these vivid, memorable poems sing of and out of the mixed blessing of consciousness, as in these opening lines from the book's opening poem, "Prayer" -- "That the hole in my skull never quite grows over / with mosses or brick. That no lover / on a ladder can patch it, no permissive meadow / can fold its field over. For there’s too much to know. / There’s too much to want never to contain."
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